my vedana

literacy...new media...education...life

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Developing your apps

With the wildfire spread of Facebook, the idea of getting or running new apps has entered into everyday discourse. Developers have for a while realized that allowing people to create their own material can enrich the core product. Harnessing the creativity that has driven the open source movement has been important to the evolution of services like Flickr and Blogger. Although I've never met anybody who has devised a successful app, there must be plenty of them judging by the rapid innovation and dissemination of their hard work. So Apple made a smart move by allowing this kind of devlopment with the iphone. The very cheap ocarina app by smule is a classic example. It turns your phone into a musical instrument. If that was all, you might say 'so what'; but by harnessing the phone's GPRS, you can listen to other ocarina playing on a global scale. I think that's both frivolous and deeply significant. Whatever will they come up with next?